Let’s say both the U.S. and Mexico decided tomorrow that they would legalize marijuana, cocaine, etc. What sort of effects would it have on the drug cartels? Would it do much to stem the violence south of the border? Would the drug lords continue raking money in hand over fist?
IIRC history does say that Prohibition made Al Capone and many gangsters of the day more powerful. Although he was also involved in gambling and prostitution, his largest moneymaker was the sale of liquor.
Once prohibition was repealed a lot of the revenue that organized crime had disappeared, and with it, also most of the corruption that even affected government.
Legalizing drugs will not end all crime and corruption, but it will reduce them a lot IMO.
If both the US and Mexico (or for that matter just the US) legalized drugs the affect on the cartels would be incredible. They would cease to become a national security issue. While I’m sure Mexico would not become a crime-free oasis overnight, the main reason that they are a major regional security issue would disappear. Currently they have incomes that compare favorably to the entire legitimate GDP of Mexico (they are responsible for 63% of it according to this link).
If you take that away they are now just another internal social issue. They would stlll I’m sure find crimes to make money from but they are going to be making orders of magnitude less than the $50bn a year they making now. And hence be orders of magnitude less powerful.
Hah. I don’t think you can put that genie back in the bottle; I’d predict that the shrinking money supply would make competition between Mexican gangs more intense and more violent. The cartels will fall apart, and they may lose political power as internecine quarrels become open warfare, but their loss of political power will be small compensation for the blood in the streets.
Can you really fight over nothing? Sure there’ll be squabbles, but give Americans a week or two to perfect wholesale production of the stuff and Mexico’ll be out of the loop almost completely.
Legazlization is one thing, production is another. The liability costs of selling cocaine, heroin, or crystal meth could be akin to those of tobacco companies.
Thus the dearth of availability of legal tobacco in America.
Although it certainly would be wise to set the taxes on the stuff low enough that there will not be very much black-market operations. If you combine all drugs together it would certainly add up to be as much or more than the current taxes on tobacco without leaving much opportunity for black market profits.
The enterprising ones will form companies and become legit suppliers. The rest will find some other racket(kidnapping, human trafficking, weapons trafficking, etc.). Nobody is going to just instantly go out of business.
How much of their business is just harmless weed, not stuff that the average American couldn’t accept legalizing/decriminalizing?
Is there a drug test that tells if a person is currently stoned? We can test for drunkeness since alcohol clears the sysem in a few hours, but pot resins stay there for weeks. If we can bust stoned drivers accurately, there’s no objection to allowing people to safely indulge.
I don’t believe there is such a test, but pot doesn’t physically impair in the same manner as alcohol. Perhaps a bit mentally distracting, but for the practiced stoner driving while high is no big deal. If anything it makes you more attentive. Or so I’ve heard.
It’s one thing to pay $200 billion in a liability settlement after you’ve been in business for a hundred years. Coming at that kind of risk as a startup is likely to be more difficult.
Except the reason for their existence is to supply US demand. Presumably whatever form legalisation takes its going to be very strictly regulated, and I can’t imagine the FDA (or whoever takes over from them in this hypothetical scheme) granting import licenses to a bunch of former drug barons from south of the border, or for that matter them doing particularly well against multi-national legal drug producers.
But the amount of money to be made from those businesses will be several orders of magnitude less than the money to be made from drugs. That is the basic problem, there is superpower on Mexico’s doorstep whose populace is willing to spend %63 of Mexico’s GDP to get stoned on Mexican drugs. You take that away and they become just an internal law-and-order problem for the Mexican government, not a cause of regional instability.
They’ll still be supplying US demand. As far as the FDA goes, why wouldn’t they grant import licenses to legitimate businesses exporting legal products? It’s not like the company is going to be called “Former Drug Barons, Inc.” They already have the product and the infrastructure; in fact their costs will actually go down because they can bring it right across the border instead of maintaining an expensive clandestine smuggling operation. No fresh upstart US operation is going to be able to compete with that, not immediately at least.
Criminals who can’t go legit will find some other way to ply their trade, that’s all I’m saying. The Chicago mob outfits didn’t fold once Prohibition was repealed; they simply moved their focus on other illicit activities. Besides, even if by some miracle marijuana gets legalized, there’s no way in hell the US Gov’t is ever going to do the same for things like heroin or PCP. There will always be an illicit drug trade; it matters little to the cartels exactly what that drug is.
But the infrastructure they have involves manufacturing drugs with no controls or safeguards in back-street labs, and smuggling them in in some poor schmuck’s bunghole. That is hardly the kind of thing the FDA looks for when they look for when they license a drug manufacturer for import to the US. Likewise not exactly the kind of operation that is going to give Merck or Pfizer a run for their money.
Though it did reduce it significantly, but the point is the matter of scale. Even at the height of prohibition, while the illegal booze trade was a big earner it was a tiny percentage of the US economy as a whole, so Al Capone and his ilk did not have enough cash at his disposal to compete with the US government. Because the drug trade in Mexico is supplied by the might of the US economy, that is not the case for the drug barons in Mexico.
At this point we are beyond the scope of the OP. Obviously if just the less profitable drugs like marijuana are legalized it’s not going to have that big an impact, and the we are long way from legalizing all drugs. Though I have to wonder how bad the situation has to get before that starts be seriously considered.
The infrastructure is on the Mexican side. Marijuana doesn’t require labs or manufacturing; it’s an agricultural product. They harvest, bale, and toss on a truck. Point-of -sale and distribution on the US side is the US’s problem.
There’s no need for this if it’s legal. Again, they chuck it on a truck and drive it right through customs. Easy and cheap. No collateral damage or the costs involved with such.
Capone’s organization was comparatively tiny; even today the Mafia as a whole only comprises 3-4000 members. Combined, the cartels possess nearly infinite financial and human resources. The US gov’t, along with any other nat’l gov’t in the world, is outmanned and outgunned, as they have always been vs. drug cartels.
Touché.
Also Tobacco had another advantage, as explained in this related joke:
"A politician is being interviewed after a discussion on tobacco taxes.
Q: If the government really wants people to stop smoking, how come it doesn’t just make cigarettes illegal?
A: Because people would smoke them anyway.
Q: Then how come the government makes crack cocaine illegal?
A: That is an unfair comparison. The tobacco industry is merely selling a deadly product; the crack cocaine industry is guilty of something far far worse.
Q: Failure to make large political donations??
A: Yes."
That was my experience too, although I’m sure that can’t be the case for everybody.
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Which they had to pay because it was shown that they new the risks and lied about it.
Assuming drugs were actually legal, I would expect a package of meth to be covered with warnings required by law about how dangerous this stuff was, and under no circumstances should you actually do it despite being legal, and here is a number to call for help quitting, and here is a recomended dose that probably won’t kill you, but seriously, don’t smoke this stuff… if it messes you up, don’t say we didn’t warn you, etc.
Given all that, I would imagine that they would not be very liable. Or, rather, I would hope so, but in America… they probably would be anyway.